


Escape Velocity

by Fireandchutes77



Category: Avatar (2009)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-01-08
Updated: 2017-02-19
Packaged: 2018-05-12 12:22:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 7,352
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5665933
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Fireandchutes77/pseuds/Fireandchutes77
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The chicken/egg aspect of how humanity originally got their hands on Unobtanium bugged me during the movie. If it's only found on Pandora, how did we get enough of it to create the spaceships to go there? My interpretation. (Originally posted on Fanfiction.net, May 2010)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

Centaurus Constellation

Centauri A-B System

~ 2,450,000 B.C.E

 

It was an unfortunate day to be sentient. 

Small blue-tinged mammals looked up perplexedly from their fretful grazing as wave after terror-stricken wave of batlike fliers screeched overhead. It was another in a series of bizarre events that had begun that morning with a blaze of light through the thick canopy, followed by a strong ground-lurch. The herbivores’ collective memory had never encountered anything quite like it.  As a nearby clan of proto-sapiens hunched back down to scoop a last cluster of berries, they vaporized as the massive shockwave ripping along behind the birds liquefied the tubers in their stomachs.

Across a wide swath of the violet-tinged moon, creatures with eyes well-adapted to prevalent dusk tumbled squawking to the ground, flash-blinded by another giant bubble of light swelling kilometers into the thick air. Within minutes, the flash was eaten up by a charcoal-clogged mushroom cloud that boiled high into the upper atmosphere. Sprouting like a gigantic zit above the verdant surface, the million-ton spray of debris finally expended its thermal energy in the thermosphere and ripped into planet-spanning mud-colored tentacles, driven by the jet stream.         

***

Orbit of a gas giant doomed its small passengers to a rough life. The planet’s massive electromagnetic aura was only partially countered by a powerful, dueling magnetosphere, and whirling into the giant’s shadow produced months of plant-killing, starvation-inducing twilight.

The mother giant also held the unenvious distinction as the largest asteroid sponge within two light-years, sucking up cosmic drifters as it spun through bands of interstellar dust. Its swirling, blue-banded surface frequently sported dark, ugly scars, as sometimes did the surface of any moon unlucky enough to be in the way.    

***

Mushroom clouds flashbulbed across the forested plains as more nuggets of the disintegrating rubble-pile asteroid crashed to earth, walking through the massive stands of trees like a barrage of otherworldly artillery. Thousands of acres of old-growth trees snapped in half under the blast waves, then exploded into fire from the heat. The infernos sapped moisture from the plants and air around them until they grew into massive, weather-creating firestorms. Tornado-strength updrafts hurled burning tree-trunks high into the atmosphere, which, coupled with an incessant rain of incandescent impact debris, sparked firestorms across the entire hemisphere.

Gaping radial cracks split open for thousands of meters away from the craters, carving the ground into giant chunks. Defying gravity’s grip, many of the monoliths bucked heavily into the air, spilling untold amounts of flaming soil down their flanks as they were forced upward by fantastic electromagnetic forces permeating the core, the soil, and the air itself.

Incinerating entire species of roosting lizardlike-fliers against its bow shock, one shell in the interstellar fusillade arced down among the soaring crags and gigantic floating mountains of the tectonic mountain chain north of the great sea. Chunks of near-pure floating superconductor directly above the blast vaporized instantly, adding a massive surge of electromagnetic energy to the devastation. Animals hundreds of kilometers away fell as the pulse fried their internal guidance systems.      

Floating mountains hovering horizontal to the blast skidded sideways and slammed into their fellows, breaking apart in a cascading cloud of floating particles, some the size of large trees.

One suspended block suffered a particularly interesting fate. Some thirty degrees off the vertical crest of the shockwave, it floated just far enough from the impact to escape immediate destruction. Flat-sloped on the blast side, angled on the other, made of near-pure mineral, it caught the sweet refraction spot of the shock wave and shot upward. Untethered from the earth, resistive to the moon’s relatively weak gravity and buoyed by the magnetic field beneath it, the rock joyously hit escape velocity. Final impurities cracked off and fell behind to join lesser fragments as the AWOL chunk muscled through the final wisps of atmosphere to clear Pandora’s orbit and enter the gas giant’s. Breaking out of the lush moon’s electromagnetic shadow, the pure chunk of superconductor rammed headlong into the full power of Polyphemus’s magnetic field.

Physics ensued. The tremendous magnetic force zinged the wayward rock off at a right angle, slingshotted at some fifty kilometers a second into deep space, and what lay beyond.        

 

\--

 _Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of earth_  
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;  
Sunward I've climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth  
Of sun-split clouds, — and done a hundred things  
Not dreamed of — wheeled and soared and swung  
High in the sunlit silence. Hov'ring there,  
I've chased the shouting wind along, and flung  
through footless halls of air. . . .

 _Up, up the long, delirious burning blue_  
I've topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace  
Where never lark, or ever eagle flew —  
And, while with silent, lifting mind I've trod  
The high untrespassed sanctity of space,  
Put out my hand, and touched –

“High Flight” [Abridged]

 

To be continued.

 


	2. Chapter 2

 

Sol System

Trans-Neptunian Belt

May 24th, 2055

“Ion thruster shutdown sequence complete. Chemical maneuver thrusters online. Engaging. Burn one... Burn two... Burn three. Burn four.

“Now sixty kilometers out, closing at fifty meters a second, relative. Time to hover-burn, twenty minutes. Over.”

Capsule commander Jeffry Taylor released the transmit button on his headset mike. The frequency quieted as his message crossed the ninety-second gulf of space and time between his Orion craft, an Indian Lagrangian reflector, a Chinese lunar relay station, and Houston control. Gone were the thirty-minute delays of early Martian exploration, but the gap still remained at these relatively extreme distances. He always had to remind himself the communications were more for documentation purposes than actual, live reporting.     

He turned in his seat to fellow cellmate Naitokya Haybusa, the craft’s Japanese-American propulsion and life-systems officer. The latter carefully monitored an OLED ‘porthole’ built into the console before them, eyes flicking across the screen as he took in growing details of the target before them.

“How’s it look?”

“Beautiful. I can’t see any major docking difficulties so far, and the striations are amazing.”

Taylor grinned happily. They were both trained scientists and geologists, one reason for their assignment for this mission. “How’re y’all going to rewrite the textbooks after we get back?”

Haybusa’s eyes narrowed slightly as he smiled a little too. “Carefully. Several times over, once the interns chug through all the data. The paper mills will be happy, at least… And I’ve gotta say, I’m glad those inflection classes can’t fully rub out Texas.”

“It slipped in again?”

“Yeah. At least it wasn’t over the comm this time.”

“Carver would be ragging on me about it for hours… I keep saying, ‘y’all’ is one of the greatest gifts to the English language, but noooo...”   

“Well, it’s not like he has anything else to do…” Haybusa trailed off and stared pensively at the approaching scene, rendered in real color, quiet for a minute or so.

Taylor leaned toward his own screen, depicting the same view but dolled up with computerized false-color and overlays. “Wow. Look at that wicked radar return...”

“…Yet still, _still_ no idea what it really is, though.”  Naitokya frowned a little, recounting the lead-up to this three-month trip in his head. “Never had a satisfying signature match, even with the Webb data. No analogues in our own crust, and it only showed up in one or two other places in the WISE III survey – ”

“Alpha-C, right?”

“Yeah…” He shrugged, the gesture barely noticeable through his pressure suit. “The computers and probes were never quite smart enough to figure out what is was – No disrespect to _you_ ,” he said, raising his voice a little.   

“None taken, sir,” replied Conrad, the user-interface end of the ship’s computer.

“Anyway, that’s why we’re here… As long as this isn’t some ‘face-hugger in disguise,’ I’ll be fine.” He chuckled.

Taylor groaned, smiling. “Not that again…” His attention slid back to the screen as a previously docile graph began jagging up and down. “Heyo... Houston, heads up. Fifty klicks out. Picking up some unexpected electromagnetic readings, over. Haybe, are you -?”

“Already on it.” He scanned over the life-support and engine condition readouts while slowing the craft’s approach.   

“- Right, Houston, slowing to a Caution Yellow approach. Maintaining. Suggestions to proceed, over.”

Three minutes later, the professionally worried voice of ground control arrived. “Readings of the last few minutes of data show no other abnormalities; the craft is performing optimally. No solar storms or similar cosmic events have registered recently. We consulted with on-site designers of the electronics and our own testing specs, and they all say the Sparks are rated to cosmic-ray status. No degradation from that level registered. Our current readings do not approach worrisome levels, and we do not believe they will reach any. Conrad, use the current disturbance levels to predict levels down to the surface, and output a report to Houston and Capsule. Over.”

“Conrad acknowledges, sir. Please wait, sir. Over.” A few seconds later a logarithmic graph appeared on the screen. “Based on extrapolation of current interference levels, Conrad does not predict that the disturbance represents a threat, and that docking with the surface is Go... I defer to you, sirs, and Houston control. Over.”

Three minutes.

“Commander, discretion remains yours. If you feel unsafe, abort… But our current evidence backs up continuing the mission. At this time we approve of a Go. Over.”

Taylor glanced at Haybusa, who checked the instrument readings one last time and nodded. “Houston, Go recommendation acknowledged. Go decision unanimous aboard the craft. We continue, over.”      

Three minutes.

“Go decision acknowledged, capsule. Godspeed. Out.”

Haybusa puffed the reaction engines a few times to regain lost thrust, and the slate-gray asteroid ahead of them grew larger.

***

 “…Twenty klicks out, closing twenty meters per second, rotational match continues to hold, systems normal,” Haybusa reported, as he had periodically once the craft came within thirty kilometers of the rendezvous. As his excitement mounted, his voice became inversely calmer.

“Electromagnetic levels continue to rise,” rejoined Taylor, “Sustained, unprecedented levels… Indications point to the asteroid as the generative vector… All instruments working within normal levels,” he added hastily, “No problems detected...”

“Fifteen klicks… ten... five…  one. One. Hold position. Final Hold. Haybusa to Houston. Decision to land, over. ”

The asteroid now towered above and below them, nearly two kilometers in total length. Its surface, though roughened by space impacts over its long life, still appeared remarkably pristine. The surface and its divots swooped and peaked with the glassy grace of obsidian. On the whole, it resembled a large, chunky, slab-sided carrot. Taylor glanced down at his instruments again. The bizarre electrical activity continued unabated.

“Capsule, Houston reads anomaly levels still within operational limits. We’ve never seen anything like this, but it doesn’t appear particularly dangerous. You guys got lucky on this one… A spot in the history books is waiting for y’all… Houston approves landing. Good luck. Out.”  

“Capsule acknowledges, and agrees. Thanks, Houston. Out.”

Taylor looked up at the displays above him. “Conrad, take us down.”

“Descent command recognized, sir. Commencing.”

The sound of firing retro rockets shuddered through the craft and the asteroid slowly swallowed up the entire viewscreen.

“Five-hundred meters, five meters-per-second…  Commander Taylor, you have watch of the craft.”

“Thank you, Officer Haybusa…  Two-hundred meters, three m.p.s…”

“Sir, airbags deploying.”

“Thanks, Conrad. One-hundred meters, two m.p.s.…” Red proximity warning lights lit up across the cockpit.

“…Fifty meters, maintaining one-meter-per-second descent rate. Thirty meters. Twenty. Ten. Airbags armed. Five…”

The two officers’ heads nodded toward the nose of the craft as a dull thud echoed up through the hull. A bright yellow light illuminated on the console, followed by a quick buzz. 

“Contact!”

Within milliseconds, the Conrad computer noted the position, stress distribution, and friction coefficient of the airbags, decided the landing was safe, and fired a circle of ten harpoon-like cables into the surrounding rock. The tungsten darts did not go in as far as expected, but they were secure enough to hold.  

Inside the cockpit, the red warning lights flashed to green.

“Touchdown, Houston, touchdown! _Altair_ base here, _Discovery II_ has landed, over!” He reached up and flicked the buzzer reset button, and the keen faded into silence.

As Conrad and Haybusa helped each other crank through the post-docking checklist, Jeffry leaned heavily back into his seat, savoring the three contemplative minutes he would have to himself before Control’s reply came back. 

He was now part of a very select group, consisting of, now, only four human crews – “The Eight” – to have ever landed on an asteroid.

 _Ooh, and I was so a’spitting furious as a kid when the Chinese beat us back to the Moon… And I remember Pa being so ungodly pissed about Obama toasting Constellation…_ His Southern Boy face cracked into an ear-splitting grin, and he saw the gleam of it reflect off his helmet visor. _Well hell, the Chinese can keep that dirtball. We’re where the future gon’ be. Luna is the kiddie pool. Deep Space is where the big boys play… And we’re getting really good at it. The EU guys raised such a big stink about the US going off to play Action Hero… Well, hell yeah! They were jealous!_     

His copilot’s voice broke through his reverie. “ – Taylor, click off the engine arm, will you.”

“Engine arm – off. 413 is in.”

“Thanks…”

Jeffry returned to his thoughts, more thoughtful this time as the enormity of the mission sunk in. It had been one of the biggest question marks since the original moon landing. All of the previous asteroid missions had known, basically, what they were landing on, because several space telescopes had done extensive scans.

It wasn’t as though this particular deep-space traveler was unknown. Infrared sky searches had turned up the long-period object in the late 2020’s, but 55060-Pesphone held no NEO prospects and was a long way off, so it was essentially ignored. Then a program of high-definition, sky-wide spectral element scans turned up a blank on the rock, as well as a similar unidentifiable signature in the direction of Alpha Centauri… Since Persephone was a lot closer, the gray lady got her due real quick. 

 _To make a long story short,_ Taylor thought with a snort, _our fellow science geeks worked out the orbit, strapped my ass atop a Falcon 15, and fired me and Buddy off to meet up with this mystery rock at its closest graze of the solar system. They don’t expect it back for another half-a-million years. We’d better not get stuck._  

His musing were broken again as his headset erupted. Three minutes. He’d lost count.

“Houston copies you down, _Discovery II!_   As they say, we’ve got a bunch of blue guys breathing again. Congratulations, both of you! Continue checkdown procedures, and call back when you’re through. The President and a foreign delegation want a word. Then start prepping for spacewalk. Over.” 

“Houston, capsule copies. Will do. Haybusa and Taylor send their regards. It’s an honor. Thank you, sir. This is capsule, out.”

***

Four hours and a phone call later, Jeffry Taylor grasped a handhold on the “upside-down” Orion capsule, floating lightly in the vacuum of space. The first aster-nauts, as they were called, had been tied to their ship by umbilical cords, much like the test pilots in the First Space Race. Spacefaring confidence had since progressed to untethered Manned Maneuvering Units – jetpacks – to cover much more terrain.       

The rock they had landed on- _docked with_ , he mentally interjected – also had negligible gravity of its own, so he nor his partner were having gee transition troubles, unlike the Martian fellows.

Above him, the stars spun gently as the rock-craft combination rotated. Looking down between his dangling feet, he saw Haybusa inching along the harpoon wires to set up the first of the geological experiments. The labs were highly automated and needed only one person to care for them, so Jeffry’s task was to take pretty pictures for _National Geographic_ and keep a watchful eye on things.    

His eyes tracked upward from his crewmate, past the docking/EVA module, to the double Orion capsules, linked tip-to-tip, which formed their home. One was command and living space, the other was storage and… more living space. _A square inch a day keeps the insanity away,_ Jeff quipped to himself, and groaned at the bad pun. The capsules had no windows – cameras and 3D screens now took care of such things– which opened up logo space, which pleased the sponsors. The white sides of spacecraft were increasingly colored by corporate logos as cash-strapped governments sought to cover their to-boldly-go bills.  

Taylor shook his head, vaguely annoyed. _We’re looking more an’ more like NASCAR with every mission… Which is ironic, ‘cause they mostly had to stop that when the fuel shorts kicked in. Usin’ the infields for soccer now, I reckon._ He shuddered instinctively. _The horrors... The rats wanted to plaster us with logos too, but even Mr. Musk put his foot down on that one, thank God._    

He frowned, studying them. The Meatball and Old Glory were still there, but they were small, squeezed into the corners near the hatches. Most of the open space on the two living craft was dedicated to corporate insignia – SpaceX, Orbital, Virgin, Bigelow, Ad Astra, Boeing-Lockheed (“Boe-heed”), Raytheon, et. al.  By far the biggest, front and center in prime real estate on both craft, was the quad-petaled _Arda_ logo. Their “Pteranodon” software ran the ship, their Earth Departure Stage boosted them off the top of SpaceX’s rocket, and they bankrolled the mission’s marketing, PR, and press releases.

 _To their credit_ , he interjected, their equipment worked flawlessly, and the pamphlets were the glossiest he’d ever seen. He even thought his bio picture was good, which was a first.

The adage that each new innovation needed half the acceptance time of the one before it still held – Wikipedia took ten years; YouTube, five; Twitter, three – but the speed at which Arda operated still left him breathless. Their very first operating system, _Raptor_ , had shredded Apple’s market share in two years and even made Ol’ Mike stagger. Their second-ever product, a browser called _Rex_ , picked its teeth with IE in one year. The company then used its success to branch out into mobile phones, electric cars, spacecraft, biotechnology, power generation, geo-engineering, and even begin dabbling in weapons research.

People said they were The Dark Google, that their corporate motto was “Don’t be – _ehhhhhh, insert hand wave._ ”  Before the hatch closed some four months ago, he’d even heard rumors about a Google-Arda partnership... that gave the new punk the catbird seat. Google would get to keep its name on the search engine and its products, for brand recognition, and Arda would get… everything else.  

In any case, it was clear they had studied the manuals of Wal-Mart, Google, AIG, Exxon, GE, GM, and Ford, cherry-picked the best ideas, and were mindful of the worst. The company’s stated goal was “Perfect, efficient, ruthless innovation,” and the philosophy extended down to their name. They’d chopped the “h” off the end some years ago. There were whispers of an acronym in the works.          

Taylor gave himself a shake. _Out here, none of that matters..._ Squinting hard through his visor, he oriented himself and just managed to pick out what he thought was Earth; the grain-sized star was just a bit bluer than the others. He held up a gloved hand, spreading his fingers. The very tip of his pinky could blot it out entirely.  

“Commander.”

The catch to his friend’s voice made Taylor start. Flexing his grip slightly, he spun 180 degrees to face “down” toward the surface.

“Officer Haybusa, is there a problem?”

“N-no… no, Commander. Not at all.” Haybusa quickly gathered a handful of rock chips and jetted ‘upward,’ slowing to a stop just below him, their visors almost touching. Taylor could now see tears in his copilot’s eyes, and the look of absolute joy that pried the droplets off his cheeks. 

The geologist opened his fist, and the motion caused the rock slivers to twirl a few inches above his palm. Facets in the rock caught the harsh sunlight and twinkled. With his other hand, he shoved an instrument readout before Taylor’s eyes.

“You are not going to believe this.”

 

\---

 

To be continued.

 


	3. Chapter 3

**Chapter 3**

For one long minute, Jeffry was silent as the vacuum surrounding him. Finally, he keyed his mike and said, very simply,

“Run the test again.”

“This is the sixth result. They’ve all been like this, sir.”

“Then run it again. I want to see it.”  

“All right…”

The two men drifted back toward the surface. With practice-numbed indifference, Taylor put out his hands and stopped himself with a kind of vertical push up-handstand, as he had during countless training sessions on the Vomit Comets and ISS. He watched and waited as Haybusa initiated the lab’s test sequence, and the instrument pack cored a fresh sample.  Several minutes later, a reading flickered up on the lab’s radiation-hardened screen.

Jeffry frowned. “That’s... can’t be an accurate reading. Are you sure you zeroed it properly?”

“Yes. And I _know_ , right? It’s impossible. I was worrying for some time that it broke somehow. But all the calibration specimens checked out a hundred percent.”

His commander smiled. “Good to see the procedure drills finally stuck. What did you do next?”

“Yep. Thanks. Well, I ran the checks several times, using different chips. Then I broke out the other labs and ran them.”

“Why didn’t you say anything when the first abnormality popped up?”

“I wanted to make sure I wasn’t getting a false negative before embarrassing myself in front of NASA, sir.”

“’Can you believe this guy, thought he discovered Eezo until he remembered to hit tare,’ eh?”

“Pretty much. I ran the other labs, and they came up with similar ‘impossible’ results, yet they all worked fine on the test samples... I worked through our known catalogue of elements, eliminating what this stuff _isn’t_ , until –”

“ – Until whatever _remains_ , _however_ improbable...”

“ _Must be the truth_.”        

“You’ve read Conan-Doyle?”

Haybusa shook his head sadly. “Never had the time. Pop-culture osmosis. But, yeah…” He trailed off and looked across the huge expanses of rock and heaven spreading away from them. Jeffry could sense the gears in his friend’s head turning thoughtfully. “Yeah. If we _have_ eliminated _all_ the impossibilities, and our instruments _aren’t_ wigging...”

“I’d say the weird readings we got earlier are making a lot more sense.”    

His science partner nodded. “Mmm. To confirm this, of course, we’re going to need a lot more tests, more than we have in the trunk. But...” He turned to Taylor, his body posture a swirl of belief and disbelief. “Man… _man,_ this is looking a _lot_ like some kind of – of high-temperature superconductor. Maybe even room-temperature.”   

Taylor whistled deeply. “That’s some mighty tall water right there, partner.” After a contemplative pause, he abruptly burst out laughing.

“...What?”

He managed to fight through his giggles. “You know what Higgens over in thermo physics is gonna call this, right?”

Haybusa smacked the forehead of his visor. “Oh, Christ.”

“Unobtanium!” Taylor dissolved into a laughter fit again.

“I always _hated_ that name... No originality!”  

“Oh – ho… ho.. ooo… Ah, er… Though, well, if this is what it seems to be, it does check all the boxes he kept saying his projects were going to check eventually –”

“Eventually, yeah. Maybe this’ll finally shut him up.”

“One can dream…” He glanced at wide expense of slate-gray rock around them. “Let’s see if we can keep the dream alive… Grab the electro-resistance and spectral hand-labs and we’ll test other parts of this junk heap to make sure we don’t have site bias.”

Haybusa nodded. Picking up a bulky lab in one hand and wafting the other to his commander, he puffed his jetpack to gain about twenty meters of altitude. 

“Hey, redneck, you comin’?”

“Hachimaki’s on too tight, Jap. I’m coming...”

The conversation quieted as Jeffry boosted to his friend’s level, and they puffed their pack jets to reach cruising speed. The two astronauts coasted smoothly, silently through the vacuum. With no surrounding points of reference, they seemed to hover in place as the rocks below slid past, as though glued to a conveyor belt.

“...Taylor?”

“Eh?”

“Let’s name it something ridiculous, just to piss him off.”

Jeffry chortled.

 

***

 

White House

June 22nd, 2055

 10:44 AM

“...And in conclusion, my colleagues and I recommend an immediate launch of course-correction packages, as soon as a firing window can be arranged.” The blue-suited Joint Chief finished speaking and assumed attention beside his Powerpoint.    

The President leaned forward across the Cabinet table. “Thank you, sir… What is the window of opportunity we have on this thing?”

“Several months, ma’am, though the longer we wait, the farther away Persephone gets, and more payload fraction must be given over to fuel, and we are limited by existing launcher capacity.  Additionally, there is a one-second daily window that we must launch inside.” 

“Very well, General. Thank you. You may be seated.” The four-star nodded precisely and sat down. “Now, what’re our resource needs to make this happen?” 

NASA Administrator Charlie Darden motioned his hand. 

“Fire away, Carl.”

“Thank you, Madam President…  Our estimates of the size and density of the deep space object – DSO for short – indicate that we will need at least five direction packages. Each is contained within its own Ares rocket asset, and contains a kilometer-wide solar sail with solar-panel skin, and a collection of electric ion engines. The sails spread out behind what is usually an NEO – ” The space director paused. “I’m not boring y’all through repetition again, am I?”

The President chuckled. “Not all of us had to sit through our dads regaling us at the dinner table with the minutiae of the space program when we were kids…” Down the table, the Secretary of Agriculture grinned and waved sheepishly. The President grinned back.  “Please continue.”

“Okey-Dokie. The force of the sun’s photons hitting the sail provides a small, continuous braking force, as well as electrical power, and the ion engines can help brake or provide directional change. The sails are connected to the DSO by thin carbon-nanotube cables, and the solar wind drags on and pushes the sails out _behind_ the asteroid, much like the parachutes on old drag-racers. This allows us to take advantage of the nanotubes’ excellent tensile capabilities.  Each ion engine has its own repositioning thrusters so it can change position on the DSO or NEO as the mission evolves. The computerized “brain” of the operation remains within the Earth Departure Stage – ah, EDS – and floats nearby, controlling the whole shebang wirelessly. This allows us to use the EDS as a small gravity tractor. Normally, we would need to send up only one or two packages, if our objective was simply to prevent an Earth impact. But because we’re taking the unprecedented step of breaking a DSO out of its own orbit and parking it in ours, and because we’d like for it to arrive here fairly quickly, we need a much greater delta-vee.”

The President nodded as he finished. “Thanks for the explanation, sir. What is the timeline we’re looking at for this operation?”

“Eleven years, ma’am, if we were to launch this week, as the esteemed Joint Chief proposes. Eleven years from launch to park in one of our L-points. I propose L-1, the Moon-Earth L-point. We’d have to horse-trade positioning slots with the Luna mine support station, among others, but the point would give us an unrivaled location from which to study and dissect our newfound wonder.”

“And what kind of preparation would be required for a launch, say thirty-six hours from now?”

The Air Force Joint Chief piped up. “Essentially none, madam. The Space Guard assets are nearly launch-on-warning, much like ICBMs during the Cold War. In accordance with the 2037 Treaty, which if you’ll remember was adopted after the 2036 Apophis Scare – ”

“I’m not _that_ young, general,” the President said with a smile. “I certainly remember _that._ ”

 The CSAF smiled back. “My apologies. But in accordance with the 2037 Treaty, a minimum alert time of 12 hours is required, and the asset has to fly a designated path to prevent confusion with an ICBM launch. Twelve hours is, I note, minimum. The Russians would _highly_ prefer to be given a longer heads-up. And, in the grand scheme of things, we would _highly_ prefer to tell them.”

“Okay, how about three weeks?  Does that present any problems with trying to catch up with our super-rock?”

 The NASA man shrugged. “ _Discovery II_ took advantage of _the_ prime launch window, and waiting another three weeks could add some additional eighteen months to the total round trip, but... it’s still doable, yes.”

The President shifted toward the Secretary of State, sitting directly to her right. “What international considerations do we have to worry about, Alex?”

“Well, once the news of the discovery came in last month, it’s the only thing anybody’s been talking about. My office assumed – correctly, it now appears – that we were going to try to bring it in and proceeded to negotiate from that angle. There are some issues over ownership rights and resource shares, but they’re jumping the gun a bit and we’re working to sort that out. The biggest issues are objections as the – ah, _redirection_ envelope sweeps over different countries as the orbit shifts.” He nodded slightly at the Secretary of Defense, who nodded slightly back. “The fear always is that we’ll have a coincidental “thruster malfunction” when the envelope lines up over Beijing or Tehran or Moscow. Given our science friends’ rough estimates of this rock’s worth, however, that would be utter, ah, silliness.” SecState caught his language and smiled briefly. “The most straightforward solution will be to call up the deflection-event protocols and treaties and tweak them a little. Our guys should be able to cool down a number of the hotheads in about three weeks, and hopefully we’ll have it all mostly ironed out by the time the thrust packs get into position way out there.”           

“Focus on that, then.” The President turned to the Cabinet at large. “Okay, everyone else: is three weeks enough to work out the technical details and alert the public?”

The room fell deeply quiet as the assembled Secretaries rapidly evaluated their department’s capabilities and current schedules. Slowly, a ring of tentative nods ringed around the table.

“Good! Then, God willing, let’s hope for clear skies and plenty of fireworks on, uh...” The President paused as she calculated the date three weeks hence. “July 14th! Meeting adjourned!”  

The assembled department heads murmured to themselves and their colleagues about the new task, as well as a hundred others, as they methodically repackaged their briefcases and computer tablets. Leaning against the wall, the President gazed out into the Rose Garden and smiled serenely at the commotion swirling about her. The room quieted as the secretaries filed out, until only the NASA administrator remained. The Commander in Chief shook her head with a trace smile.  _Carl’s one of the most brilliant people I’ve ever met… but damn is he a slow packer._ She leaned a little off the wall. “Sure is something, eh, Carl?”

Darden looked up quickly from his paper-stuffing. “Yes, Madam President?”

“A little less formality’s fine now, Carl. The meeting’s over.” She sighed, chuckled, and did a small jazz-hands celebratory pump. “We’re living in the future _now_ , ain’t we? Roping an asteroid and everything!”       

Mr. Darden grinned. “Sure we is... I think people started saying that once we popped Apophis out of the keyhole, but this is certainly something new. And those first landings in the 2020’s really caught the public’s imagination. You would not _believe_ the fanmail NASA got.”

The President shook her head sadly. “Boy, you wouldn’t _believe_ the flack my dad got for putting us on track in the first place. Everybody was like, “The Moon! The Moon!” back then ‘cause of the Constellation program, but Daddy thought it’d be more bang for the buck to go after ‘stroids and Mars.” She laughed. “I was waaay too young to care, of course... I kept wanting to tell him about the art project I did at school.” 

The administrator chuckled. “And now here you are. By the way, how’s Sasha doing these days?”

“Good, good. She chaired that long-term study of the BP Spill a few years ago.”

“Oh, yeah. I remember that report.”

“Now I think she’s leading a nonprofit to use old fuel cells and batteries in people’s cars as home generators, or something like that. Her boy Daniel is going to be _so_ psyched about this whole asteroid business. Has all the action figures from the first couple asteroid landings. Talks your ear off about ion drives and those unobtani-ma-call-it experiments!”

Charlie finally snapped his briefcase shut and stood upright. “Sounds like my kind of guy!”

“Certainly is. Maybe I could set up a meeting once all this is over and you’re not as busy.”

“Sounds like a plan. Call me back in 2098 or so.”

The President laughed. “Go launch that rocket!”

“Yes, Madame President, ma’am!” The NASA director hustled out of the office and pulled the door behind him.

Silence finally fell. The president turned to face the west wall. Crossing her arms, she leaned against a chair back and gazed at the presidential portrait of Barack Obama, nestled between JFK and FDR. Her eyes softened.

“We livin’ in the future now, Daddy.”

 

To be continued.       


	4. Chapter 4

**Chapter 4**

July 19th, 2069

Richmond, Virginia

9:02 PM

 

Bliss in a strip mall.

Trisha Barnes curled back against the grassy rise behind her and stared, unfocused, at the purpling sky, nostrils filled with the strong, crisp smell of freshly mown grass. Hollow, sun-dried crabgrass stalks poked sharply into her back and bared arms as she settled in. Trisha didn’t mind. She’d forgotten how delightfully raw and intimate – how _real_ – grass actually felt; she usually saw its level plains from five and a half feet up, insulated and isolated from its texture by her shoes. Relaxing, brain shifting into neutral, she realized she couldn’t recall the last time she’d simply flopped out on the lawn, and wondered if any of her friends could. She doubted it.

Drinking in her senses, she closed her eyes.                

_It’s a night to be alive._

The urban heat island was cooling slowly, and as it did, the region’s infamously wicked humidity ebbed. At present, the balance of temperature and humidity hovered close to tangible perfection. Thick, warm air caressed her shoulders like a boyfriend’s hug, and night settled like a comfortable blanket. Trisha felt an inexplicable joy to be human and alive. This was a simple Americana she thought she was too cool for. This was a summer’s summer night.          

She craned her neck up as an electronic chime distantly ding-a-linged. Her boyfriend was edging his way out the restaurant’s push door, nudging it open with his back and shuffling through to keep the milkshake in each hand stable. As he crossed the drive-through lane and walked across the parking lot, humidity-misted light from the curly red sign above lit up his side.

She pushed herself upright, resting her hands behind her on the grass. The tang of the night changed from turf to tar as she swung forward toward the restaurant’s freshly-resurfaced parking lot. She wondered vaguely just how much it had cost them; oil had reached a new record two weeks ago and was gunning to break it again this week.  

“Here ya go...”

“Thanks, Darrell...” She took the proffered cup and poked in a wide-bore straw. Her boyfriend sat down beside her on their favorite curb. For the three years they’d been dating, this spot had been their point of relaxation and stability on warm nights. “The Green,” they called it, a small slice of grassy median in the corner of the Chick-fil-A parking lot, sandwiched between the lot, one of the mall’s entrance roads, and the four-lane road it linked to. The small patch was one of the very few “natural” spots they knew of in the entire area; the fifty acres of forest that had existed across the road from the restaurant vanished long before Trisha was born.  

“Damn. Hot out here.”

She giggled. “You were inside that nice A/C too long.” She finally pulled a shot of the thick sludge up the straw, and her eyes widened. “...Vanilla?”

“Hey, you said ‘surprise me.’”

Trisha leaned against his shoulder. “Vanilla’s my favorite. Thanks... What’d you get?”

“Peach.”             

“Mmm…”

They turned their attention to their shakes. The dip in conversation brought the sound of the road next to them to the fore. Cars slurped past, tires humming as they skimmed the asphalt. An older-model electric car slowed and turned into the entrance road behind them, its regen brakes and engine whining noticeably.

Darrell glanced up as his own car gurgled softly nearby. _Oh. Right. Just coolant through the fuel cell..._

Over the rim of his bio-foam cup, he eyed a large milkshake advertisement spread over the facing wall of the restaurant, and its exhortations of the products’ taste, texture, and low cost. What the ad certainly didn’t contain was the enticement of “made with real dairy.” He remembered that pitch fading away sometime as a young child, around the time the government restricted meat and dairy production in an effort to slow global warming. _If today’s heat was any indication,_ he thought dully _, it hadn’t really worked._ He pulled another sip of his shake. _And whatever’s in here, it sure as hell ain’t milk. But I haven’t had any of the real stuff in so long I probably couldn’t tell the difference. Tastes good enough, anyway..._            

Above them, the sky slowly leached of color, heading toward a uniform navy blue. In the fifteen minutes before full darkness, deep red traces of the sun lingered faintly over crisscrossing contrails of jet and rocket exhaust. Darrell’s gaze followed them east. The straight, orderly ones were produced by the ubiquitous, manta-like blended wing bodies that took off from airports the world over. Thin, thoroughly dispersed, cone-shaped streaks were the signatures of the Wallops Island spaceport; its supply rockets launched on a rigid six-hour schedule, four a day, day after day.     

Trisha’s shoulder-pillow was disrupted as his head moved, and she looked up too. Peeking between the contrails, burning through the thin veil of smog that hung across the planet, were stars. She gasped. “Oh... Wow... It’s really clear tonight.” She raised an arm and pointed toward one of the brightest ones. “What one’s that?”

“Um.”

“Oh, come on, you’re the smart spacey spaceman.”

He squinted. “I... think... that’s Vega. Or Betelgeuse. Erm... Maybe Venus.” He pulled out his pocket comp – only his grandparents called them “cell phones” –  booted up the star app, and pointed it at the sky. “Ah... Deneb.”

“You remember the first time _I_ really saw stars?”

He nodded. Trisha chuckled. She’d been twenty-three, and it had been one of their first dates. Darrell, something of an “outdoors freak” by the standards of his peers, drove them out to Shenandoah National Park, which was one of the few places left where it was possible to see an entire star field, not just the few brightest stars. Trisha freaked when her mobile dropped signal; it was the first time it had ever happened. She couldn’t understand why the jammers laid out around the park’s boundaries were one of its _draws._ But then the stars had come out.  Trish shuddered in the warmth of the suburban parking lot, her awe still tangible. 

She’d had a revelation.

Everybody knew what stars were. WiFi contact lenses ensured that. Everybody could spit out, on the spot, a stream of stellar coordinates, hydrogen ratios, Kelvin temperatures.

Nobody knew what stars _were_. In that instant, under a dome of ancient light, she understood her boyfriend’s “outside craziness,” his devotion to his job, the primal starlight connection that linked humanity across millennia.

She’d cried.         

Trish dissolved into the present as she took another sip of her rapidly-melting shake. She spent a moment vacuuming up the dregs with her straw, then looked up again. Forcing her lips into a smile, she pointed toward a very bright star sitting low on the horizon. “Huh. I wonder what _that_ one is.”

Her boyfriend snorted. “Nice try. Like you don’t know. _That_ , hon, is your new set of car tires.”

Trisha carefully placed her cup on the pavement and slowly wrapped her arms around his midsection, resting her head against his cest. “Don’t joke.”

“I’m not. I know you’re nearly on the rims of those things.”

“Damn it, I’ve told you don’t care about that damn piece of junk!” Her outburst echoed across the blacktop. Nobody looked up, thoroughly ensconced in their cars as they were. Between the two on the curb, a deep, empty silence hung as she pulled herself back together. “... I care about _you_.”

He put a slow arm around her waist and sighed heavily. “Baby, you know it’s safe. They’ve done hundreds of flights; they’ve got procedures and safety gear for everything. Don’t worry.”

“I worry every time you go up there! There’s always the launch risk, and then there’s space debris, and cosmic rays, and... and...”

“Shhhhhh.... Shhhhhhh.... Shhhhh...” He gave her a little shake. “I’m just a bolt-turner, remember? Not some scientist or hot-rod astro way out on the end of the platform.”

“Yeah, which means the Company doesn’t give a damn about what happens to you.”

“You know that’s not true. Do you remember that whole thing with Ricky and that blown ammonia tank? You remember? Remember how they nearly shut down the whole platform to save him? You know – _I_ know – they’d never leave us behind.”                 

Trisha was silent for a long time. Then she said, flatly, “You still boost tomorrow, right?”

“Yeah. Oh-six-hundred. I’ll probably have to get up around two to be on the road by 2:30.” He sighed. “God, early start. I’ll take 64 out to the fast-cat ferry in Deltaville... That’ll run me up to this side of the Seaboard at Saxis, and I’ll drive over the Neck to Wallops.” They both knew the sequence a hundred times over, but breaking down the trip yet again piece-by-piece eased the jitters. “Then an hour of intake, then launch, then...” He waved his fingers toward the low star. “...A week at Delta Station to get acclimated. And then a week after that, we finally wrestle that giant chunk of God-Knows-What to a dead stop.”

He snorted angrily. “Three years over the first estimates. I know they had no clue just how dense that thing was at the time – which is good in the long run, I guess, ‘cause it means more stuff - but, damn... Did they botch it. First they said six months over, then it was a year, then two, then three.  The Company kept saying I was in for the biggest paycheck I’d ever seen, but three extra years is a long time for a man... and his girl…” He gave her a squeeze, “To wait...”

“What’re we going to do with the money, Darr?”

“Get a house, fix your car, maybe even rustle up a patch of yard...” He caught himself and smiled wistfully. “But... gotta remember we don’t have it yet.”

“They pay you a percentage of its total worth, right? The news goes on and on around in circles about it, but they’ve never even said what might be in it for us at the bottom.”

He nodded. “Yeah. But, shoot, they don’t have any idea what it is, hon. None of them do – not the news, not the company scientists. I stopped trustin’ anything they said when they blew the estimate for, like, the twelfth time.” Darrell shrugged. “I just hope it’s worth a few more pennies a pound than helium three.”      

The two lovers gazed up at the shining dot of humanity’s fourth space station and the hive of space vehicles swarming around it, and the sun went all the way down.  

\---

To be continued.


End file.
